


Howling

by Yeomanrand



Series: Love and Loss [1]
Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: 1000-3000 words, Gen, over 1000 words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-18
Updated: 2010-02-18
Packaged: 2017-10-07 08:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/63478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeomanrand/pseuds/Yeomanrand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One restless night in Iowa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Howling

**Author's Note:**

> If descriptions of someone else's depression and/or mothers nursing bother you, probably not the fic for you. Otherwise, I don't think anything here is triggery.

_There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.--George Carlin_

Winona can't sleep. Hasn't slept more than five minutes at a go since Jim was born, and always wakes up short of breath, something silken, dark, and heavy coiled around or within her chest.

Tonight, the air around her is heavy with moisture and crackling with energy; she lies on top of the Wandering Foot quilt her grandmother made when she was still a babe in arms, one of four things she brought here from her old life, and wonders if the stillness or the house around her is the source of her suffocation. When she rolls over to look out the window she sees no clouds in the sky; the storm, if it comes at all, is still hours away.

Her mother wants her to sleep with the window snugly closed and the blinds drawn, but she has never minded moonlight and she needs to see the stars.

Jimmy, in his cradle next to her bed, makes a soft snuffling cry, but only one before his breathing falls back into a quick sleeping rhythm. She rises, the moonlight softening the white of her flesh until she feels nearly translucent, as though she were a vessel for the sun's reflected light, or perhaps a distorted crystal; she almost wants to check and see whether she's throwing a shadow or a muted rainbow.

She knows these thoughts are fancies of exhaustion. She knows she should lie back down on the bed, try again to close her eyes and sleep before Jimmy wakes enough to demand feeding.

She checks on her son, insubstantial fingers brushing the healthy drowsing pink of his cheeks. He turns his head toward her caress, lips making vague suckling motions, eyes slitting open so very blue. He doesn't fuss -- he never fusses when he's woken, only when he rouses alone -- and at five months his smile could already break hearts. Her parents say he has George's smile, and George's parents say he has Winona's, but Winona only sees Jim, and she carefully lifts him up to rest on her shoulder. He puts his fingers on her lips and coos.

She knows what she should feel, what she wants to feel, what she felt with Sam at this age. But Sam was never this tiny, and the darkness coiled inside her shifts and tightens while she blows on Jim's palm, lips lightly at those still too-slender fingers. Jim's skin is scalding where he nuzzles against her bare neck, but only because she has no warmth, not because he is febrile.

She carries him down the hall, a dandelion tuft bearing the heart of a star, blown by desire; if she relied on the wind, she would have tumbled to earth, to seed, long ago. Jim gurgles quietly when she pauses, listening to the house creak and settle around them.

The door to Sam's room slides open quietly. He's sleeping, just like everyone except her and Jim, half-curled on his side, sweat-damp hair clinging to the back of his neck. He's kicked the covers off, and despite the infant in her arms she drifts into the room to replace them. She knows this is a losing battle, one that her mother fought with her until she was nearly grown. There is wanderlust in all of them, even if they are only free to run in their dreams.

She watches Sam's hands and covered feet twitch. Remembers dreaming, remembers other hot nights when the stars outshone the moon, and George a solid anchor to wherever they were, soothing her out of a restive sleep, his hands gentle on her arms, shoulders ... her breath catches because her darkness stirs in her chest, and she turns away from the boy slumbering in the bed.

Jim is sucking a hickey into her shoulder; she ghosts her way down the hall, through the kitchen, outside to the ever-so-slightly rusted swing set her mother turned into a plant hanger the September Winona left for San Francisco. She lies back on the slide and gives Jim her breast, staring up at the moon, one hand cupped under his neck. She softly names the Mares and mountains for Jim, patches of darkness and light shaped by her mind into a rabbit or a face or nothing recognizable as either, the lassitude she always feels when nursing weighting down her limbs. She curls her toes into the loamy earth, moves on to stars and constellations.

An eerie ululation, distant and hollow, raises the hair on her arms. Even Jim stops suckling to turn his head, look up into the sky, as if only the moon could lament so.

The sound bounces and echoes, caroming around inside Winona until the dark thing living in her chest twists again, loses its grip, allows her to take her first full breath in a lifetime. She inhales deep, the air and the clamor reverberating through her, drawing the darkness like poison until at last she can take in no more and everything rushes outward, charged particles jump from the atmosphere to the earth, and her own howl joins the chorus.

Jim startles against her chest, a reminder she isn't alone, but she can no more stop than sprout wings and fly, not until she's expelled all the air she took in and the darkness and what was left of her dinner besides, the last over the edge of the slide, body curling to protect Jim. Finally she falls back, head connecting with the metal beneath her hard enough to mimic thunder, hand rubbing circles on Jim's back, trying to soothe his whimpering.

She half-expects someone to come running out of the house. After a moment, the crickets begin singing around her again, and the faintest of breezes brushes her damp face but warm, like the tender touch of fingertips, and she lets her eyes fall closed, just for a moment, an orange echo of the moon all she sees behind her lids.

She wakes in her bed, substantial again, feet and legs warm beneath the quilt. Jimmy waves his hands beside her, cooing and burbling contentedly in the golden sunlight. She smiles at him and caresses the top of his head before sitting up, brushing off her feet, and telling herself the cobwebs and grit are nothing but the lingering dust of dreams.


End file.
